“Holy Jesus!” One of the yeomen in the USS Remembrance’s wireless shack yanked off his earphones and stared at his pal. “You hear that, Zach?”
“Sure as hell did,” Zach answered, scribbling furiously on the pad in front of him.
“What’s up?” Sam Carsten asked. As usual when not on duty, he was killing time in the wireless shack. It was warm—the aeroplane carrier cruised between Florida and the U.S.-occupied Bahamas—but at least he was out of the sun. He wished the yeomen weren’t wearing earphones. That way, he could have heard whatever it was, too. But they liked to get rid of distractions from the outside world—nosy officers, for instance—when they listened to Morse.
Zach finished writing, then dropped the pencil. “Signal going out in clear to the Confederate Army and Navy, sir,” he answered. “Their vice president—Willy Knight, his name is—has resigned, and he’s under arrest.”
“Christ!” Sam said. The other yeoman—his name was Freddy—was on the phone to the bridge with the news. Carsten heard a startled squawk on the other end of the line when it went through. He felt like squawking himself. Instead, he asked, “How come, for the love of Mike?”
“Story they’re giving out is, he was the fellow behind the stalwarts who tried to take out Featherston a couple weeks ago,” Zach said.
“Christ!” Carsten repeated, louder and with more emphasis this time. “That’s the kind of crap that happens in Argentina or Nicaragua or one of those places, not up here.”
“Yes, sir.” The yeoman nodded. He knew better than to come right out and contradict an officer, no matter how stupid that officer had just been. He got his barb in, all right, but politely: “Except it just did.”
“Well, what do they do now?” Sam asked. “They arrested Knight, you say? They going to give him a blindfold and a cigarette and stand him up against a wall?”
“No report on that, sir,” Zach answered. “Only an alert. He has resigned. He has been arrested. No orders issued in his name are to be obeyed.”
Sam wondered exactly what that meant, too. Had Willy Knight tried to get the Army, or some of it, to move against Jake Featherston? If he had, it didn’t sound as if he’d had much luck. Luck or not, though, nobody in either the USA or the CSA had ever tried to play that particular game before.
“He wanted to put on a Napoleon suit, but it turned out to be three sizes too big,” Sam judged. Both yeomen in the wireless shack nodded this time.
He hung around the wireless shack, hoping for more details, but no more seemed forthcoming. About ten minutes later, the klaxons began to hoot, ordering the crew to general quarters. He thought it was a drill. He hoped it was a drill. He got down to his station in the bowels of the Remembrance in jig time even so.
“What the hell’s going on, sir?” a sailor in the damage-control party asked. “They ain’t sprung one of these on us in a while.”
“I’m not sure,” said Sam, who had a pretty good idea. “Maybe Lieutenant Commander Pottinger knows more about it than I do.”
But when Pottinger got there half a minute later, he said, “Now what?” in tones mightily aggrieved. He proceeded to explain himself: “I was in the head, God damn it, when the hooters started screeching.”
A couple of sailors smiled. Nobody laughed. That had happened to every man who’d been in the Navy more than a few months. Carsten said, “Well, sir, I don’t know for certain, but… .” He told what he’d heard about Willy Knight.
“Shit.” Pottinger didn’t usually talk that way; maybe his recent misadventure preyed on his mind. He gathered himself and went on, “What the hell are the Confederates going to do now?”
“Beats me, sir,” Sam answered. “But I expect it explains the general-quarters call: they want to make damn sure they don’t go and do it to us.”
“Makes sense,” Pottinger agreed. He shifted uncomfortably. “If they keep us here too long, though, I’m going to need a honey bucket.” Again, nobody laughed. Carsten approved of an officer who wouldn’t abandon his post even in the face of what would ordinarily have been an urgent need.
The all-clear sounded before Lieutenant Commander Pottinger was reduced to such indignities. The officer in charge of the damage-control party left with dignified haste.
Carsten headed back to the wireless shack. He found the door closed against snoopy interlopers like himself. Somebody on the Remembrance was taking the news out of the CSA very seriously indeed. Sam’s suspicions fell on Commander Cressy. Taking things seriously was how the exec earned his pay.
Balked from getting more news, Sam went out on the flight deck. By the rumors flying among the sailors there, the powers that be had shut the door to the wireless shack too late. Somebody claimed Willy Knight had already been shot. Somebody else said he was still in jail, awaiting trial as a U.S. spy. A grizzled bosun insisted Knight had been trying to flee up into Maryland when he was caught. Other claims seemed to spring from thin air.
Some of them were probably true. Sam had no idea which, though. He listened to them all, admiring the ones he found most impressive. He might have done the same thing watching girls on a street corner in a liberty port.
The Remembrance pitched a little as she steamed south, but the sea was a lot calmer here than it would have been in the open waters of the North Atlantic at this time of year. The sun shone down out of a sky mostly blue. In these latitudes, even the winter sun could burn Sam’s tender hide. Sea birds scudded along the breeze or dove into the ocean after fish.
But that buzz Carsten heard didn’t come from gulls or petrels. Those were aeroplane motors—and they weren’t the motors of the machines aboard the Remembrance. This was a different note. Peering west, Sam saw several brightly painted aeroplanes nearing the carrier. They zoomed past low enough for him to read the words CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY on their sides.
A sailor saluted the machines from the CSA with his middle finger. Another man said, “I hear those bastards all have guns in ’em these days.”
Sam had heard the same thing. As with the news about Willy Knight, he didn’t know how much to believe, but there was probably a fire somewhere under all that smoke. A petty officer said, “We ought to splash a couple of ’em, fish ’em out of the drink, and damn well see for ourselves.”
That took things right to the edge, because a lot of sailors were nodding. Sam felt he had to draw back a step or two, and he did: “We don’t shoot at them unless they shoot first, or unless we get orders from the skipper, which means orders from the Navy Department back in Philadelphia.”
That petty officer muttered something Carsten decided he didn’t have to notice in any official way. Just as well, too, for it wasn’t a compliment. The fellow knew he was a mustang, and wondered why he took the attitudes of ordinary officers. That was what it amounted to, anyhow; the way the petty officer put it, it would have knocked down one of those CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY machines without bothering about the carrier’s antiaircraft guns.
Both the flyby and the news out of the CSA got kicked around in the officers’ mess that evening. The foulmouthed petty officer might have been surprised, for a lot of the officers he’d sneered at agreed with him. “Those Confederate bastards are just poking at us, seeing how much they can get away with,” was a common sentiment. “We ought to break their fingers for ’em, remind ’em who won the last war.”
“Maybe this business with Knight means they’ll start fighting among themselves and leave us alone for a while,” a lieutenant said.
“Don’t bet on it.” Commander Cressy entered the fray with his usual authority. “If they’d got rid of Featherston, then, maybe. The way things are, he just gets the excuse to clamp down harder.”
“Wonder if Knight really was spying for us,” a lieutenant commander said.
In your dreams, Carsten thought. He didn’t say that, not to an officer two grades senior to him, but he held the opinion very strongly.
And he wasn’t the only one, for the executive officer snorted and said, “Not likely. He’s done us too much harm over the years to make it easy to believe he was on our side all along. But we can deny it till we’re blue in the face, and that won’t do us any good.”
“Wonder what excuse Knight had for getting rid of him,” someone said. “Whatever it was, too bad it didn’t work.”
“Featherston is going to run again, and Knight didn’t think he should,” Sam said. “Knight figured he was going to get elected this coming November, but their Constitutional amendment screwed his chances.”
“Could be,” Commander Cressy said. “Could be, but we don’t know for sure. The Confederates are saying Knight was the guy behind those fellows who tried to shoot Featherston, but how do we know that’s true? Far as I can see, we don’t. Featherston might be using the assassination attempt as an excuse to get rid of Knight, regardless of whether he really had anything to do with it.”
That cynical assessment stopped talk in its tracks. At last, Lieutenant Commander Pottinger whistled in reluctant admiration. “You don’t believe in anything, do you, sir?” he said.
“Not without evidence,” Cressy answered at once. “We haven’t got any, except for what the Confederate wireless says. And the Confederate wireless lies. It lies like a drunk telling his wife what happened to the grocery money. Are you going to trust it just because it says something you might want to hear?”
Again, no one spoke for a little while. Sam eyed the exec with real respect. He had believed the wireless reports from the CSA. They were the only news he had, so why not believe them? He hadn’t found any reason not to, but Commander Cressy had—and a damn good reason, too.
“Makes it harder to figure out what the Confederates are up to if we can’t believe anything they say,” he remarked.
“That’s not our worry,” Cressy said. “The way I look at things is, we don’t believe any of it till we either have evidence of our own that we should or until our superiors tell us what’s true and what isn’t. You can bet they’ve got spies inside the CSA finding out what the straight dope is.”
I hope they do. They’d be damn fools if they didn’t, Carsten thought. That cheered him, but not for long. A lifetime in the Navy had convinced him that a lot of his superiors were damn fools, and the only thing he could do about it was try to keep them from causing as much harm as possible.
He did say, “I wonder how many spies the Confederates have in the USA.”
Nobody answered the question, which produced a chilly silence in the wardroom. He might have started talking about whorehouses he’d known at a women’s club meeting. The Remembrance’s officers were willing enough to think about their own spies, but not about the other fellow’s.
Commander Cressy looked thoughtful, though he didn’t say anything. But then, Commander Cressy always looked thoughtful, so Sam wasn’t sure how much that proved, or whether it proved anything at all.
Every once in a while, Boston cast up a mild, springlike day, even if the calendar said it was early February. If it was a Saturday, too, well, all the better. People who’d stayed indoors as much as they could since winter slammed down emerged from their nests, blinking at the watery sunshine and the pale blue sky. They might almost have been animals coming out of hibernation.
Sylvia Enos certainly felt that way. With the mercury in the high forties—one reckless weatherman on the wireless even talked about the fifties—she wanted to be out and doing things. She didn’t need to worry about long johns or overcoat or mittens or thick wool muffler. All she had to do was throw a sweater on over her blouse and go outside. And, gratefully, she did.
Mary Jane didn’t even bother with a sweater, perhaps because her blouse was wool, perhaps because she wanted to show off while she had the chance. Sylvia minded that impulse less than she’d thought she would in a daughter. Mary Jane was heading from her mid- toward her late twenties, and hadn’t snagged a husband yet. She didn’t seem unduly worried about it, either. As far as Sylvia was concerned, a little display might be in order.
They went to Quincy Market, next to Faneuil Hall. The grasshopper on the weather vane atop Faneuil Hall showed the wind coming out of the south. Pointing to it, Sylvia said, “That’s the only good thing from the Confederate States: the weather, I mean.” She paused to light a cigarette, then shook her head. “No, I take it back. Their tobacco’s nice, too. The rest? Forget it.”
“Let me have one of those, will you?” Mary Jane said. Sylvia handed her the pack, then leaned close to give her a light. Mary Jane sucked in smoke. She blew it out and nodded. “That’s pretty good, all right.”
A sailor on leave whistled at her. She ignored him. Sylvia would have ignored him, too. He was a little bowlegged fellow with a face like a ferret’s. Ten seconds later, he whistled at another woman. She didn’t pay any attention to him, either.
Mary Jane said, “How’s Ernie? Or don’t I want to know?”
“He’s not that bad,” Sylvia said defensively. “He’s been … sweet lately. His writing is going better. That always helps.” Ernie said it helped him starve slow instead of fast. As long as Sylvia had known him, though, he’d always managed to make at least some kind of living from his typewriter.
“Hurrah,” Mary Jane said. “Hasn’t pulled a gun on you lately?”
“Not lately,” Sylvia agreed.
“I don’t care how sweet he is. He’s trouble,” her daughter said.
She was probably right. No—she was right, and Sylvia knew it. That didn’t mean she wanted to dump Ernie. If she’d wanted to, she would have long since. The whiff of danger he brought to things excited her. (Actually, it was a good deal more than a whiff, but Sylvia refused to dwell on that.) And, if anything, his … shortcoming posed a challenge. When she pleased him, she knew she’d accomplished something.
How to put that into words? “He may be trouble, but he’s never dull.”
“He may not be dull, but he’s trouble,” her daughter said.
Again, Sylvia didn’t argue. She just kept walking past the stalls and shops of Quincy Market. People sold everything from home-canned chowder and oyster stew to books to frying pans to furniture to jewelry to hats. Mary Jane admired sterling-silver cups that aped ones made by Paul Revere. Sylvia admired the cups, too, but not their prices. Those horrified her. “They’re for rich tourists,” she said.
“I know,” Mary Jane answered. “But they are pretty.”
Someone—not a tourist, by his accent, which was purest Boston—took a silver gravy boat up to the shopkeeper and peeled green bills out of his wallet. Sylvia sighed. “It must be fun to be able to afford nice things,” she said.
Mary Jane pointed to a new stall across the way. “Those look nice,” she said, “and they might not be too expensive.”
Sylvia read the sign: “ ‘Clogston’s Quilts.’ ” She shivered, knowing winter wasn’t over in spite of this mild day. “Some of the blankets are getting pretty ratty, all right. Let’s go have a look.”
The quilts on display made a rainbow under a roof of waterproof canvas. They were carefully laid out with an eye to which colors went with others, and that only made the display more enticing. Some duplicated colonial patterns, while others were brightly modern.
“Hello, ladies,” said the proprietor, a pleasant woman in her early forties with a wide smile and very white teeth. “Help you with something?”
“Do you make all these?” Mary Jane blurted.
“I sure do. Chris Clogston, at your service.” She dipped her head in the same brisk way a man running a shop might have used. “When you don’t see me here, you’ll find me at the sewing machine.”
“When do you sleep, Mrs.—uh, Miss—Clogston?” Sylvia asked, awkwardly changing the question when she noticed the other woman wore no ring.
“Sleep? What’s that? I just hang myself in a corner now and then to get the wrinkles out.” Chris Clogston laughed. It was a good laugh, a laugh that invited anyone who heard it to share the joke. She went on, “I do stay busy, but I like making quilts, picking out the colors and making sure everything is strong and will last. It doesn’t seem like work. And it beats the stuffing”—she laughed again—“out of going to a factory every day.”
“Oh, yes.” Sylvia had done her share of that and more. “What sort of living do you make, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I’m still here,” the shopkeeper answered. “Actually, I’m new here, new in Quincy Market. The rent for this space is twice what I paid where I was before, but I get a lot more customers, so it’s worth it.” Her gray eyes widened a little. “And what can I interest you in?”
“That one’s pretty.” Sylvia pointed.
Chris Clogston nodded, seeming pleased. “I’m glad you like it. That pattern’s been in the family for I don’t know how long—since before the Revolution, anyhow. I’m a ninth-generation Clogston in America. John, the first one we know about, came to Boston before 1740, out of Belfast.”
“Wow,” Mary Jane said.
“Wow is right,” Sylvia said. “I can’t trace my pedigree back past my great-grandfather, and I don’t know much about him.”
“My granny was mad for family history, and she gave me some of the bug,” Chris Clogston said. She picked up the quilt. “Now, this particular one is stuffed with cotton. I also make it stuffed with goose down if you want it extra warm. That will cost you more, though.”
“How much is this one, and how much would it be with the down?” Sylvia asked.
“This one’s $4.45,” the quiltmaker answered. “It’s nice and toasty, too—don’t get me wrong. If you want it with goose down, though, it goes up to $7.75.”
Sylvia didn’t need to think about whether she could afford the down-stuffed quilt; she knew she couldn’t. The cotton … Even the cotton was a reach, but she said, “I’ll take it.”
“You won’t be sorry,” Chris Clogston said. “It’ll last you a lifetime.”
Mary Jane pointed to a small quilt in pink and blue. “Let’s get that one, too, for George and Connie’s baby.” Sylvia hesitated, not because she didn’t like the quilt but because she couldn’t afford to spend the money. Mary Jane said, “Don’t worry, Ma. I’ll spring for it. It’ll use up some overtime I got last week.” She grinned. “Easy come, easy go.”
The small quilt cost $2.25. Mary Jane did pay, and didn’t blink. Sylvia hadn’t known about the overtime. She wondered if it was mythical. She didn’t quarrel with her daughter, though. George and Connie would be happy to have the quilt for their little boy.
“Thank you very much, ladies,” Chris Clogston called as Sylvia and Mary Jane left the stall.
“Thank you,” Sylvia answered, well pleased with the quilt she’d bought. She looked up at the blue sky and the bravely shining sun. “I wonder how long this weather will hold.”
“As long as it does,” Mary Jane said. “We just have to enjoy it till it’s gone.”
“I intend to,” Sylvia said, and then, after a few steps through the crowded Quincy Market, “It’s like that with Ernie and me, too, you know.”
Mary Jane only shrugged. “I can’t talk sense into your head about that. I’ve tried, and it doesn’t work. But I still don’t think he’s good for you.”
“Good for me?” Sylvia hadn’t worried about that. “He’s … interesting. Things happen when he’s around, and you never know beforehand what they’ll be.”
“Maybe,” Mary Jane said, “but some of the time I bet you wish you did.”
She was right. Sylvia knew it. Ernie had frightened her in ways no one else had matched, or even approached. She sometimes—often—thought he was most in earnest when his mood turned blackest. Even so … “Never a dull moment,” she said. “That counts for something, too.”
“Pa would have said the same thing, wouldn’t he, after his destroyer dodged a torpedo?” Mary Jane replied. “But one day the destroyer didn’t dodge, and that’s how come I hardly remember my own father.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Sylvia said. “I paid him back, though.” Roger Kimball was dead, sure enough. But that didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t, bring George Enos, Senior, back to life. Mary Jane would never have the memories she was missing. All Sylvia had left were her memories.
Mary Jane changed the subject as abruptly as anyone could: “Let’s go over to the Union Oyster House for an early supper. I can’t remember the last time I was there.”
“Why not?” Sylvia said, thinking in for a penny, in for a pound. They’d already spent a lot of money today; after that, what was a little more? The Union Oyster House was only a couple of blocks from the market square. The building in which it operated had stood on the same spot since the early eighteenth century. The restaurant itself had been there for more than a hundred years. People said Daniel Webster had drunk at the cramped little bar.
Almost everything about the Union Oyster House was cramped and little, from the stairs people descended to get down to the main level to the panes of glass in the windows to the tiny wooden booths into which diners squeezed. Sylvia and Mary Jane snagged a booth with no trouble—they got in ahead of the evening rush.
The one place where the restaurant didn’t stint was on the portions. The plates of fried oysters and fried potatoes a harried-looking waiter set in front of the two women would have fed a couple of lumberjacks, or possibly a couple of football teams. “How am I going to eat all that?” Sylvia asked. Then she did. Mary Jane cleaned her plate, too.
Going home happily full, carrying things they’d wanted to buy, made a good end to a good day. And two men on the trolley car stood up to give Sylvia and her daughter their seats. That didn’t happen all the time, either.
Spread on the bed, the quilt looked even finer than it had in Chris Clogston’s stall. It promised to be warm, too. Sylvia wanted to burrow under it right then and there.
“How about that, Ma?” Mary Jane said.
Sylvia nodded. “Yes. How about that?” She wondered what Ernie would say when he saw the quilt. Probably something sarcastic, she thought. Well, if he does, too bad for him.
Lucien Galtier cleaned the farmhouse as if his life depended on it. He was not the sort of slob a lot of men living by themselves would have been. Marie wouldn’t have liked that, and he took his wife’s opinions more seriously now that she was gone than he had while she was there to enforce them. But he knew he couldn’t hope to match the standard she set, and he hadn’t tried. He’d set his own, less strict, standard and lived up to that.
Now, though, he tried to match what Marie would have done. That meant a lot of extra scrubbing and dusting. It meant cleaning out corners where dirt lingered—though he still didn’t attack the corners with needles, as Marie might have done. It meant putting things in closets and deciding what was too far gone even to linger in a closet any more. It meant a lot of extra work.
He did the extra work not merely from a sense of duty but from a sense of pride. He was going to bring Éloise Granche here, and he wanted everything perfect. If she thought he lived like a pig in a sty … Well, so what? some part of him jeered. She doesn’t want to marry you anyhow.
He ignored the internal scoffing. He didn’t so much think it wrong as think it irrelevant. Seeing a clean house wouldn’t make Éloise change her mind and want to live here. When she spoke of patrimony and the problems marriage would cause both families, she was firm, she was decisive—and, as far as Lucien could see, she was dead right.
That wasn’t why he worked till his lungs burned and his heart pounded and his chest ached: worked harder than he did on the farm at any time of the year but harvest. He worked himself into a panting tizzy for one of the oldest reasons in the world: he wanted to impress the woman he cared about. They were already lovers; impressing her wouldn’t get him anything but a smile and perhaps a quick, offhand compliment. He knew that. His mother hadn’t raised a fool. Hoping to see that smile kept him slaving away with a smile on his own face.
After he couldn’t find anything else left to clean, he cleaned himself. He made lavish, even extravagant, use of water he heated on the stove. On a warmer day, he could have luxuriated in the steaming tub for a long time, letting the hot water soak the kinks out of his back. But water didn’t stay hot forever, not in winter in Quebec it didn’t. When it started to cool off, which it did all too soon, he got out and dried off in a hurry.
He thought about putting on his black wool suit when he went to get Éloise: thought about it and discarded the notion in the next breath. She would think someone had died, and he was on his way to the funeral. And besides, the suit smelled so strongly of mothballs, it would have made her eyes water. It stayed in the closet. He put on the clothes he would have worn to a dance—work clothes, but the best he had, and also impeccably clean. If he wouldn’t go to Éloise’s reeking of mothballs, he wouldn’t go reeking of stale sweat, either.
He’d just set a warm wool cap on his head and was putting on his overcoat when someone knocked on the door. “Tabernac!” he snarled. Who the devil would come bothering him now, when he had more important things to worry about than a neighbor who’d run out of chicken feed?
Before he went to the door, he shrugged on his overcoat. I was just going out would cut any visit short. With dramatic suddenness, he threw the door open. Whoever was out there, Lucien intended to make him feel guilty.
Dr. Leonard O’Doull stared at him, surprised but not visibly afflicted with guilt.
“What have we here?” Galtier’s son-in-law asked. “Is it that you are so eager to escape my company?”
Yes, Galtier thought, but he couldn’t say that. “I was about to go out for a drive,” he replied.
“In this?” O’Doull waved at the swirling snow. Now he sounded more than surprised; he sounded astonished. “Me, I had to come down to the hospital today, and from the hospital it is but a short hop here. But why would you go out for a drive if you don’t have to?”
“To visit a friend,” Lucien replied, which was part of the truth, though he was careful to say un ami and not une amie: he didn’t want O’Doull knowing his friend was of the feminine persuasion. Realizing his son-in-law wouldn’t disappear in the wind, he stepped aside. “Come in. No point letting the heat out of the house.”
“No, certainly not.” O’Doull did come in, and stamped snow all over the tidy entry hall. Lucien did his best not to wince. Slowly, he shed his own coat and cap. Leonard O’Doull slithered out of his overcoat with a sigh of relief. He went on, “I won’t keep you long, since it’s plain you have such important business elsewhere.”
Galtier pretended not to notice the sarcasm. “Unfortunately, I do,” he said, which made O’Doull raise a gingery eyebrow. Lucien waved him to the couch. “But sit down. What sort of gossip have you heard at the hospital?”
“At the hospital? Nothing much.” O’Doull stretched his long legs out in front of him. To Galtier’s relief, he didn’t put his feet up on the table, as he’d sometimes been known to do. “Still, though, gossip does come to a doctor’s office.”
“Does it?” Lucien said tonelessly.
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it does,” his son-in-law replied. “And it could even be that the gossip that comes is true, though I did not think so before I knocked on your door.”
“Since you have not told me what this gossip is, I have no idea whether it is true or not,” Lucien said. “Should I care?” Were people starting to talk about Éloise and him?
Leonard O’Doull didn’t directly answer that. Instead, he asked, “Mon beau-père, are you a happy man?”
That question took Galtier by surprise. He thought for a moment, then answered, “Most of the time, I am too busy working even to wonder.”
“All right. Never mind.” Dr. O’Doull smiled. “I hope, when you do have time away from your work, I hope you are happy, however you get to be that way. I hope so, and so does Nicole. And I have talked with Charles and Georges and Denise. They all feel the same way. I have not talked with your other two daughters, but I am sure they would agree.”
“Are you? Would they?” Lucien said. “And why is everyone so intimately concerned with my happiness?” That didn’t quite take the bull by the horns, but it came close.
O’Doull smiled at him. “Because of the gossip, as I said.”
“Well? And what is this gossip? And why are you acting like an old woman and listening to it?” There. Now Lucien would find out whatever there was to find out.
So he thought, anyhow. But O’Doull only smiled and said, “That it could be you have some reason for happiness.”
“Well, if I do, that reason is not a beau-fils who comes around snooping after what I am doing,” Lucien said pointedly.
This time, Leonard O’Doull laughed out loud. “As if you never did any snooping of your own,” he said. The only comeback Galtier found for that was dignified silence, so he used it. But even silence made his son-in-law laugh at him. O’Doull got to his feet.
“Well, mon beau-père, I won’t keep you any more. I hope you find happiness wherever you can.”
He didn’t even wait for an answer. He just put on his hat and overcoat and left. Through the howl of the wind, Lucien heard his son-in-law’s old Ford roar to flatulent life. The motorcar sputtered up the path from the farmhouse to the road. Then its noise faded away.
As soon as quiet returned, Lucien put on his own warm clothes again. He hoped the Chevrolet would start. It did. The battery might be going, but it wasn’t quite gone. He let the engine get good and warm, then put the auto in gear and drove off to Éloise Granche’s.
“What kept you?” she said when he knocked on the door. “I expected you half an hour ago.”
“My son-in-law paid me a call,” he answered with a shrug. “From what Leonard says, there may be some gossip about us. Do you mind? Does it bother you?”
“No, not at all,” Éloise said with a shrug of her own. “I’ve always expected it. We should be grateful it’s taken this long to show up.”
“Who knows whether it has?” Lucien said. “It’s taken this long for one of us to hear about it, yes. But that’s different. Who knows how long people have been mumbling this, that, or the other thing?”
Éloise looked thoughtful. Slowly, she nodded. “Yes, it could be that you are right. Still, it is a small thing. Shall we go?”
“Certainly,” Lucien replied. He held the passenger door of the Chevrolet open for her, then went around to the driver’s side. Again, the motorcar started. Lucien surreptitiously patted the steering wheel. The machine might be less reliable than a horse, but it was doing what it was supposed to do.
Hardly any traffic was on the road as he drove back to his own farmhouse. The autos and trucks that did appear seemed to come out of nowhere, loom enormously for a moment through the swirling snow, and then disappear as abruptly as they’d come into view. “Everything goes by so fast,” Éloise murmured.
“Tu as raison,” Galtier said. “That was what gave me the hardest time when I learned to drive after the war.” Up till then, he hadn’t had a prayer of affording a motorcar. Only a bargain with the Americans for the land they’d taken from his farm for their hospital had let him do it. He went on, “In a buggy or a wagon, you have time to look away from the road and back again. In a motorcar? No. Mon Dieu, no. If you do not pay attention every moment, you will have a wreck.”
He got back to his house without having a wreck. He was anxious even so as he handed Éloise out of the Chevrolet. The anxiety grew on the short walk to the front door. He thought the place was reasonably tidy. But what did he know? What did he really know? He was only a man, after all.
When he opened the door, he distracted Éloise for a moment by flipping the switch and turning on a lamp across the room. “Electricity,” she said, and nodded to herself. “Yes, I knew you had it. It’s so much brighter and finer than kerosene.”
A moment later, Lucien wondered whether that fine, bright light was what he wanted. It would let her see every flaw in his housekeeping. Mercifully, though, she didn’t seem inclined to be critical. She let him guide her through the house, every so often nodding again.
“Very nice,” she said when the tour was done. “Very nice indeed. I am glad you’re comfortable. I have worried about you living here by yourself.” She raised an eyebrow. “Somehow, though, I doubt everything is quite so neat when you are not having company over.”
Lucien looked back at her, nothing but innocence on his face. “Why, my sweet, what can you possibly mean by that?”
Éloise started to explain exactly what she meant. Then she caught the glint in his eye and started to laugh instead. “You!” she said fondly. “You are a devil, aren’t you?”
“If I am, it is because you make me one,” Galtier answered. He took her in his arms to show just what kind of devil she made him. Her lips were sweet against his. She didn’t kiss quite like Marie—but she was probably thinking he didn’t kiss like her dead husband. And so what, either way? They were kissing each other, and nothing else mattered, not right then.